With increasing development of information industries and networks, the services provided through networks are becoming more and more appealing in various applications. Recently, the concepts of the cloud computing technology have been emerged, and thus the data center becomes more important. A data center is a facility used to house a plurality of computers and/or servers. For providing intensive network applications, the computers and/or servers should be timely increased, removed or replaced. Consequently, the installation positions of the computers and/or servers in the data center can be effectively and timely adjusted in order to meet the requirements of the increasingly competitive environment.
Generally, the computers and/or servers of the data center are in communication with each other through the network to exchange data. For normally transmitting data through the network, an IP address (Internet Protocol address) is assigned to each of the computers and/or servers according to the Internet protocol. Conventionally, the data center has a DHCP (dynamic host configuration protocol) server for automatically assigning IP addresses to respective computers and/or servers. In such way, the IP addresses can be quickly acquired by corresponding computers and/or servers.
Generally, the assigning method of the DHCP server is performed by referring to the usage statuses of the IP addresses and the available IP addresses (i.e. remaining IP addresses). Although each of the computers and/or servers acquires an IP address and its identity is clearly recognized in the network domain according to the IP address, there is no correlation between the IP address and its installation position in the data center.
In a case that one of the computers and/or servers fails to be normally operated, a management program of the data center may issue a notification message to inform the maintenance worker to repair the damaged computer or server. Since the maintenance worker fails to realize the real installation position of the damaged server of the data center according to the IP address of the damaged server. That is, the damaged server needs to be searched from a great number of servers (e.g. thousands or tens of thousands of servers) of the data center by a skillful maintenance worker. The process of searching the damaged server is time-consuming and labor-intensive.
Therefore, there is a need of providing an improved IP address assigning method and a data center using such method so as to obviated the drawbacks encountered from the prior art.